Thinking About an Iceberg: Aisha Sabatini Sloan on Visual Mapping, chronology, and Balance

Aisha Sabatini Sloan was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She studied English Literature at Carleton College and went on to earn an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and published in 2017. That book went on to be nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, and to win CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction. Her book-length essay, Borealis, was recently published by Coffee House Press’ Spatial Species imprint, and an image/text collaboration with her father, Captioning the Archives, was released by McSweeney’s Publications. She is a recipient of the 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, a 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and Borealis is a finalist for the Lambda award for bisexual nonfiction. She is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Michigan, where she holds a dual appointment with the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the Residential College.

On Thursday, May 12, 2022, Aisha Sabatini Sloan joined The Interlochen Review editors Nicholas Bonifas, Simone Chaney, Lucy Dale and Morgan Spencer for a virtual conversation on memory, landscape, and writing in relation to visual mediums. 

Nicholas Bonifas: How is writing essays with a stronger presence of form, such as “Playlist for a Road Trip with Your Father,” which is modeled after a playlist or “How to Prepare to See the Royall Family Portrait,” which takes the form of a list of instructions, similar to or different from writing other essays?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: I think that “Playlist for a Road Trip with Your Father” has a more obvious structure in the numbered playlist, but it wasn’t necessarily as structured in terms of how I put it together. I usually actually spend a lot more time trying to kind of engineer how I wanted all the different pieces to talk to each other and that was a little bit more straightforwardly translating notes from this road trip int…I don’t know if you’ve studied the hermit crab essay where there’s a form that you repurpose like an encyclopedia or dictionary, or like Eula Biss does the pain scale repurposing that and infusing it with personal narrative. It was imposing this playlist format which was a genre of writing for the publication that I was writing for, Autostraddle. So even though it kind of has a more explicit structure, it has a lot less structural integrity than a lot of the essays that I do write. I try to do a lot of research and prepare all of the arcs to intersect in a specific kind of way, so it’s kind of like presenting itself as more structured than it actually is I think. 

NB: What was the experience like writing Borealis, a novel length essay, as opposed to writing shorter essays, or collections of essays? How does your approach to writing differ between longer and shorter forms?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Borealis was a real departure in part because it was a prompted essay, so it’s not necessarily something I totally conceived of myself. It was something that the press Coffee House came up with as an idea to write a book about place that was sort of outside the world of travelogue and the model for that series is a very experimental book that is the opposite of entertaining. And so I was trying to answer these weird prompts that I was given for that piece and I’d never written something book-length before. I was very unsure the whole time what I was doing, so I didn’t actually use the same structural kind of tools that I usually use. I think that I ended up trying to make the sentence accomplish what I tend to make a section accomplish. I was more interested in making leaps within the syntax of a single sentence or paragraph, so it felt a little more like a poetic project. And I think that allowed for me to have a firmer foundation to have those more structurally sound pieces to build with—then it was able to be a longer piece.

Morgan Spencer: In the essay, Borealis, different sections of the essay have different lengths, with the shorter ones being just as powerful as the longer ones. How do you decide which sections to make longer and need the most page space, and which ones can be told in a few sentences?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: I think that it sort of reminds me of visual art or photography where  sometimes a composition has a lot of detail and sometimes it’s more spare, like I feel like there’s more of an intuitive sense of how to decide what went on the page. But I do think that it’s more likely that a more spare segment has a lot of weight, which we have to be careful of as writers because it can be a real flex moment, like a reader is meant to anticipate that a shorter section is meant to have more oomph. I think that we have to be sparing with that kind of thing. I really did map the book out visually ahead of time on the kitchen table so I feel like part of the arranging of how long or short things were had to do with a sense of rhythm and trying to balance between both ideas and descriptions and the overall sense of chronology. And so I was aware of having shorter and longer sections balance each other. 

Simone Chaney: Borealis consists of largely vignettes and a modular story structure, often jumping in time. How do you decide how to order these vignettes? Where to start and end the reader?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Yeah, again [for] the book itself, I used visual mapping strategies to lay it all out and see what I wanted to happen in terms of progression but even within the pieces—because of where I come from I have a very visual sensibility. It’s almost like creating a color composition, or collage is something I refer to in the book and I think that sometimes the vignettes might feel too bland or something like that, so I would need to add in a line of red, sometimes literally and sometimes emotionally and conceptually. And so in this case I feel like I did a little more revision than I usually do, in that I wrote a journal a lot while I was there. Then I typed it up and collected other pieces of reference that I wanted to include. And then I mapped that out and typed it up. I experienced revision as more of an artistic process than I have in the past. I was really tinkering with composition in a way that I would a collage or a painting. 

MS: Throughout the essay Borealis, we often slip from past tense to present very easily. How do you balance these tense switches and make it feel effortless for the reader?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: I don’t know that it feels so effortless at the time, but I think that it’s in the same way I’ve been saying that I wanted to anticipate the manuscript rhythmically—how it moved and how individual vignettes were constructed. I think tense was one of the things that entered that weaving. I had the present tense of the travel in Alaska as one thread, and then in order to give that texture and complexity, I brought in memory and some future events which happened after the trip to give a little depth to that present tense narration, which is intentionally flat. Like the Georges Perec book I was describing, which has these straightforward, almost intentionally boring, descriptions of what’s going on. In order to give that a sense of depth or complexity, I added in the element of time. Thinking about an iceberg and everything underneath, I think it was an important element of sculpting the arc of the book.

MS: In Borealis “the dog named after a bird” is a detail that comes up frequently throughout the essay. How do you decide what details should come up throughout the essay and which ones should be mentioned once or twice?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: I don’t think those things are always noticeable. I remember I had this friend in grad school point out that I mentioned hot beverages constantly, and I had no idea that I was doing that. I mentioned coffee five times per page. So that’s one of the things I think is helpful to have other readers point out for you. I don’t know that I intentionally included that dog so much, but he was a really integral part of the relationship that I was grieving. It was a part of the emotional landscape that I was trying to relive. 

Lucy Dale: In the essay Borealis, much time is spent on describing the setting around the speaker, whether that be in Alaska or, in some cases, Arizona. And then that description runs parallel to something that happened to the speaker. How did you decide how to pair a setting with each event? And how was it different writing so strongly about place?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Well, one thing that was great to have was a good relationship with the editor that I was working with, Youmna Chlala. She asked me to bring in more places, more place references, so that Alaska would be more legible as a distinct place. She encouraged me to bring in more description. It was so present in my mind that I wasn’t aware I wasn’t bringing it onto the page. So I think the desert landscape was intentionally woven through to give some contrast to the more arctic, blue, green, white landscape. That was something I think the collaborative process helped bring about, with the editor I was working with. 

SC: Borealis is part of a series exploring place, and I was wondering how this affected the writing process? Did it change what you chose to write about? Or how the essay was structured?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Definitely, yeah. This is the first book in the series, so in a way it had to stand alone despite the fact that they were intending to present these as a box set. You know, where you get a box of four or five, maybe even two, just to give a sense of that geographical range. It was weird because I was writing alongside other people who hadn’t written yet or ideas that hadn’t been conceived of yet. I felt like I was part of a collaboration that no one else could see, and that was a little bit confusing because it wasn’t how I usually write—it’s a little bit more formally ambiguous. I really had to trust that the reader would go along with this project without having the context of the other pieces, or potentially not even paying attention to the prompt of the project, so I felt a little bit nervous. It created a sense of perilousness as I was writing and putting it out into the world—that people wouldn’t get it. But I also think that it allowed me to be a little bit more adventurous formally than I normally am. I let myself make wilder associations and be more indulgent with white space than I normally am. 

NB: Similar to your essay Borealis, several essays in your collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit focus on the city Detroit. How was the experience of writing about Alaska similar to or different from writing about Detroit? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: When I was originally invited to write for the series, Detroit was mentioned as a potential topic for the project, and I felt immediately resistant to that. First of all, I think the politics of writing about a city that is misunderstood in the media, or maligned in the media—or in the imagination of a lot of people in the country—is that it comes with a certain responsibility. It’s something that people take really seriously, especially people in Detroit. I write about Detroit with a lot of intentionality and care and trepidation because there’s this real potential to reaffirm stereotypes or to speak out of turn. Even though my family is from Detroit and I’ve spent a lot of time there, I didn’t grow up there. I have a complicated relationship with what it means to write about Detroit with integrity and authority. Even though I’ve written about Detroit and will continue to write about it, I don’t like being told to write about it. I wiggled out of that.

I don’t know if I thought about it this way then, but Alaska is a place that I hold very little claim to externally—in the sense of my biography—but I have an emotional attachment to it because of the kinds of moments in my life that I spent there. Those summers. And because I think that Alaska doesn't have as complicated a reputation—it’s conceived as a really beautiful, adventuresome frontier. I felt that it was a little less complicated for me to write about as an outsider. It was interesting for me to try and write about outsider-ness through the experience of being in Alaska. What drew me in part to write about it was the visual of art pieces that I had seen. The video artist Isaac Julien was using a Black model in an arctic environment in order to call attention to the contrast, both visually and historically, of Black people in that environment. How there’s this dissonance in imagining Black people in that space despite people like Matthew Henson, who are an integral part of those histories. 

Both places make me really attentive to my position as an outsider, but I felt more comfortable exploring that in Alaska than I did in Detroit. I have deep roots there and I think the sensation of outsider-ness is more painful and dangerous, in the sense that writing about family and poverty and writing about politics in that environment feels more complicated. It’s not to say that writing about Alaska isn’t, but I just didn’t feel that same sense of pressure. 

NB: I have another question about Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. There's an essay of the same title in the collection, so what made you choose to title the collection after this essay and in general how do you go about titling your essays and your collections?

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: That’s a great thing to think about. I feel like titling often comes after the essay has been written for me. I know with this particular collection I had been playing with those essays for a long time and I had all of these serious, depressing essays, some that aren’t in the collection, and I kept trying to arrange them and it felt really unbalanced. Around that time, my wife encouraged me to apply to write for this publication, Autostraddle, which is a little more lighthearted. That then allowed me to play around a little bit with my personality in my writing in a way that I hadn’t before. It allowed me to be more conversational with prose and then integrating those into the collection really brought to life the pieces. I was immediately able to take things out that felt like they were weighing it down. One of those pieces that I added in, although it’s not necessarily light hearted, is “Dreaming of Ramandi in Detroit,” and adding that in suddenly gave me a sense of what the collection was. I titled it that to signal that it encompassed everything that gave the collection a sense of identity, and in part because of the idea that having these two coordinates, thinking in terms of dreaming or imagination, helped me see what the collection was. 

I think generally speaking when I’m trying to come up with a title I’m thinking about queuing to the reader what to anticipate from the piece or the collection as a whole. I know when I graduated from grad school and I was first trying to publish, I was having a really hard time figuring out where to send to, and someone gave me the advice to look at where people who wrote in a similar style were publishing. So, I had this week where I just went through all these essays that I was working on and I looked at where another writer had published very similar kinds of essays. I tried to think of, well this one is about Detroit so I’ll send it to Michigan Review Quarterly, and this one is about identity so I’ll send this to Identity Theory. I then had this new game plan, where I retitled the essays in a way that made them seem more inviting, because the title is the first signal to the reader that they should come on in. I tried to make them more inviting and more legible through the titles, but also tried to wink to the heart of the essay without giving it away, so usually I try to find a title within the language of a piece. 

NB: I have one more question for you. You often include descriptions of artwork in your essays. For example “Ocean Park, No. 6” or “A Clear Presence.” How do you decide what artists and which of their pieces feel suited to the subject matter of the particular essay you are writing? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: It’s more that a piece of art has had a strong impact on me and I’m trying to go back and follow the tethers that link me to it. For example, for “Ocean Park, No. 6” in particular, those Diebenkorn paintings are so deeply associated with Juliette. There's this web of artistic associations within that relationship that I was really fascinated by. So it wasn’t so much that I was trying to think of interesting art to write about, it was more like I was more fascinated with what art does. It’s like I’m trying to go backward and explain to myself how it’s possible to feel so much awe and wonder, a deep complex emotion because of something two dimensional. Same with “A Clear Presence''— there's a depth to those paintings that feels like an alternate history of Los Angeles is embedded in them. It's like they offered this opportunity to investigate the landscape of this two dimensional object essentially for something that I knew was there, that I knew I was missing. Those things talk to each other in a way I couldn’t even have anticipated, like with the Rodney King essay, and I had written down on a piece of paper David Hockney and Rodney King. I knew I wanted to explore that, but I kept trying to write that essay and it wasn’t coming together, and then he died in a swimming pool. Even before that happened—the sort of coincidence of him passing away in this sort of iconic space that defines Los Angeles and the cultural imagination—I felt that David Hockney and Rodney King were the duality of that city. Where on the one hand there’s that very luxurious and light-drenched, and then on the other hand this same sort of complicated racial history that the rest of the country has, it’s just hidden differently. I feel like the way I have tried to describe it before is a Buddhist concept of codependent origination, where it’s like the ideas exist alongside each other, and come out as one. It's a matter of trying to articulate what that relationship is. 

LD: Your essay “Ocean Park No 6” is one of my favorite pieces I’ve read while here at Interlochen. Could you speak a little about how this essay came to be and what it was like braiding together all of the different elements of this piece? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Thank you for saying that. It’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve written. That piece felt very much like a collaboration. I know at the time that I came up with the idea for it, I was thinking about mortality a lot, and doing a lot of meditation and workshops. A lot of thinking about presence and mindfulness has to do with thinking about death and thinking about how fragile life is. I found it really powerful and emotional, and I think that’s part of how mindfulness gets mistaught in a corporate or capitalistic environment—you actually can come to appreciate your life more deeply by considering how precarious it is. 

I wanted to write a book about death essentially, which is how I got to that point where I felt like the collection was really heavy, so one of the first things I felt drawn to was  one of the first experiences I had with death, which was Julliette’s son, Ramin. What was fascinating about the associations I had with his death was that Julliette so strongly and distinctly introduced me to the power of artistic experience through both literature and painting and just life, living, the improvisation of living. So I had this very ambitious goal of talking with her about her son’s death, which was complicated. Long before I started writing it I’d just start talking with her about that. She knew that’s what we were doing, but it didn’t make it any less difficult for her. Along the way I kind of wanted to talk with her about these artistic associations that for me are so wound up in that experience of witnessing her loss. 

She had this thing that didn’t even come through in the essay, this association with Wallace Stegner and Richard Diebenkorn. It’s almost like I went on a wild goose chase to try to follow those associations she has with these artists that she sort of gave to me. So there’s things that don’t even appear in the essay. I remember going on a train ride and reading Wallace Stegner and thinking about Angle of Repose and trying to investigate this association, one of those things where she felt like there was some connection between these men, but wasn’t sure what it was. So I just really spent a lot of time with each of the references in that piece, like living them. For the Phillip Glass reference, which is more just my own association, my partner and I got in the car and drove to L.A. to go see Einstein on the Beach and then we couldn’t go see that opera so we went and saw a talk. I treated it like an adventure, which I guess isn’t that unusual for some of the other pieces like the road trip essays. I really didn’t rush it. I think that it’s really special, it felt really special to do that, to kind of live the research instead of making it a more scholarly thing, just sitting there and reading about something. I was trying to feel my way through it. 

SC: My next question is about Captioning the Archives. I was wondering about your process for writing the essay. Did it differ from how you usually craft essays? Did the discussions about the photographs shape what you decided to write? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Well, sort of. So, for that book we had these conversations, many of them over Zoom because it was the beginning of Covid. Oftentimes the conversation was much, much, much longer than what ended up on the page. We would talk for hours, then I would transcribe it, and hone down into a block of text. I originally had written some essays to go along with the pieces for the book, but then I was kind of in a hurry because I was pregnant, so I was about to have the baby, and I thought oh, I just have to be done with this. After the baby was born, I had said that I would write a couple of things. Because I had these deadlines I was like, oh, I’m going to write about my dad’s relationship with this actor. I also had written these pieces about Detroit for this column that I was writing, Detroit Archives, and there were a couple of pieces that were connected to my dad’s photographs, “On Immolation,” the last one, so I just ended up writing things that I realized could go in the book. The things I wrote for Detroit Archives kind of predated the book. It was before I even conceptualized there might be a book I was trying to write in a way that celebrated and pointed to the complexity of my dad’s work. “His Own Private Diaspora,” “Black Hollywood.” Those are the capstones and then I was able to fill in. Those pieces are definitely more informed by the conversations with my dad, the sort of tangential associative quality of those conversations, but trying to create a little bit more context so that people could really appreciate the little moments of conversation if they understood a little bit more about the trajectory of his career and the stories around stories. 

MS: I have another question about Captioning the Archives—part of the essay is interviews and writing about another person. Do you approach writing about someone else's memories and experiences differently than those that are strictly your own? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: I think in that context it’s complicated because my dad will tell the same story over and over again about a photograph, so I would have to monitor my own response to his answers. You know, I would say, “oh, yeah, here’s this one picture, what’s the story about that?” and he would, instead of telling a story he’d told a hundred times, he’d tell this other story. So, I would often be like, “no, Dad, tell this story.” I feel like I had to balance between going with him where he wanted to go, and where his memories and associations wanted to go, but also trying to do justice to the stories that I knew he had about those pictures. So, it was definitely a balancing act and an act of protracted patience and losing patience. For the both of us, because my dad is a real associative thinker and talker, so sometimes he would just be talking about an article that he read this morning or something like that instead of a picture, so there was a bit of wrangling. But I also wanted to honor that associative quality, which is why a lot of the captions start with a picture and end with a picture, but they go wildly elsewhere because that’s just how he tells stories. So, it was a balancing act for sure. I would say I really tried to get out of the way of that for him more so than if I were writing about him myself. I tried to do as much as I could to take myself out of that process, although obviously I had a big shadow over it. I wanted that book to feel more his than mine.